Contents

Literature Reviewed

The purpose of this page is to post the recent articles that we in the Stephanopoulos group review in our nearly-weekly literature review presentations. Sometimes the presenter focuses on a particular paper, and sometimes the roughly one-hour talk gives a brief overview of an important series of related papers.

27 April 2006: Curt Fischer

Curt presented a recent PNAS article [1] which explicated a newly-discovered operon in E. coli. This operon encodes a previously unreported pathway for uracil degradation, which ends in the excretion of 3-hydroxypropionic acid in the medium. He also briefly mentioned two other recent high-profile papers on nitrogen metabolism--one reported the genome sequence of a anaerobic ammonium oxidizing bacterium and hypthesized the full structure of this metabolic pathway [2], and the other presents laborious and careful analysis carbon utilization of non-thermophilic archaea living in medium-depth oceanic waters[3]. These bacteria fix inorganic carbon and oxidize nitrogen, and are probably major players in the global nitrogen cycle.

4 May 2006: Joel Forrest Moxley

Joel gave an excellent overview of several landmark papers about new tools for high-throughput data collection in systems biology. The papers were made possible by advances in tiling DNA microarrays, protein arrays, and automated yeast transformation and colony characterization.

18 May 2006: José O. Alemán

José gave a brief overview of two papers looking at insulin resistance from a perspective of cellular and animal experiments. The first uses cellular and animal experiments addressing reactive oxygen species' role in insulin resistance, while the second carefully dissects insulin signaling in the liver to tease divergent metabolic control of glucose and lipid metabolism.